Copperhead Road

Warren County, Tennessee. July, 1980

The stormclouds came down from the West that morning before the first light of day. Long fronts of great hulking thunderheads lumbering across the vault in the pre-dawn dim, bunching up against one another at the plateau like immense bolls of cotton packing into a baling chute. By the time I was waved through the roadblock, the sky was a vast rolling canopy stretching as far as I could see, its underbelly pitching and yawing like groundswells on a storm-churned ocean turned upside down and suspended above the world. On the ground, in the vacuum between earth and sky, the air was still and close. Air you tasted when you breathed. Air that tasted like wet brimstone. Like electricity.

   I took the binoculars from Cantrell, a short, stocky, by the book agent from Nashville, unwound the strap from between the lens cans, set both elbows on the roof of the cruiser and eyelined the length of asphalt below us, a ball of cold air dropping through my chest like a plumb bob. It’d been a good ten years or longer since I’d laid eyes on this road, let alone set foot on it, and another ten or more would’ve been just fine by me. My list of Places I Pray to God I Never See Again only has two bullets: The ‘Nam, and this godforsaken quarter mile of workhouse blacktop.

   I cut a sideways glance at Cantrell. Wondered if he had any clue where he was barricaded, where he was standing. Any clue at all about the man and the family they’d surrounded. It was fair to say that everybody in a three-county radius either knew them personally or knew them by name. Knew this road, had a notion how many shiners had been killed on it back in the day, running to Knoxville and back, and had heard somewhere, from somebody, some version of how it got its name. Over time, it’d become a kind of rural myth, rich fodder for warnings and nightmares from two generations of parents.

   Story was they were cutting the road in the thirties and an old boy on a prison work detail ran his arm under the rotted trunk of a dead redbud tree and got his hand hung in the middle of a nest of copperheads. Barely made it back to the infirmary. Road gang found nine more nests and lost two more men from the detail before they soaked the ground in kerosene and burned the snakes out.

   I shook the memory, brought the binoculars up and glassed the road.

   Sorry and untended, it unspooled off 70 like a roll of faded black funeral ribbon, its edges worn and frayed and its far end long since gone to gravel and dust. It ran a straight three hundred yards or more, cutting through five or ten acres of commercial land on one side and a county salt and sand yard on the other and then looked to simply dead end at a wall of timber and brush. But I knew this road. Knew it cut a hard left there at the trees and ran behind the brushrow for fifty, sixty yards before it hung a right at the Murphy crossing and then dog-legged over the rise and out of sight.  I guessed the second roadblock was likely at the Sligo Junction.

   I rolled the focus wheel on the binoculars and fixed on the tarnished green and white highway sign at the roadbreak. The plate riveted atop a rusted, galvanized postpipe; the white painted letters on the sign faded away in spots, but still legible, still clear enough to make out through the fieldglasses. Clear enough for anyone that could read to know the proper name of what short little stretch of hell they’d ended up on.

   Below it, across the graveled cut and nearly hidden by the wall of brush crowding the road, I could just make out a four by four post with a black mailbox hanging akilter off the top of it, marking a narrow rutted drive cutting a crease through a stand of trees behind it.

   The house lay some twenty yards beyond the windbreak, thirty, maybe. Spreading, interlaced branches from the trees draped like an old and torn camouflage net, but I could see enough. I’d seen scores just like it and grew up in one. A low-slung brick and frame that looked like it probably started out a Sears & Roebuck catalog home when it was new. But like half the old places across these hills, time, poverty and ignorance had stripped all that new away, and left a barely-standing shotgun shack of a house in its place, one that looked like it was no more than a couple of framing nails shy of coming down in a pile of rotten studs and sheetrock.

   The few window frames I could see looked to be boarded with 4x8 sheets of plywood or old panels of rusted roofing tin. Sagging at the bearing beam like it was, it looked less like a house than a bunker. And the two flags hanging at forty-five off each post on the front porch didn’t help any. The red, white and blue cantilevered off of one, and the black and gold unit flag for Airborne off the other.

   Tiger Force.

I felt a cold wire run up the column of my spine like a snake. You didn’t advertise you were

part of that unit, not if you were smart. Especially with a couple score of your old crew on trial for war crimes so brutal that the press couldn’t print half of what they’d uncovered. This was going from bad to worse. I did my best to shrug it off and scanned the grounds.

   To the right of the house, three vehicles lined up nose-to-taillights in front of a prefab metal garage with a rusted out Sinclair Oil sign above the doors: an old Dodge shot with primer sat up on blocks, parked in front of a white pickup on lifters with a length of tarpaulin or maybe plastic hanging askew over half the tailgate, blanketing everything embossed there but rolet. Behind it, a state cruiser: a plain blue wrapper with a whip on the trunk, the driver’s door open, the windows blown out, the Trooper’s body hanging out the door,  her uniform shredded from shrapnel, her legs hung under the steering wheel. Even this far away, the smell of burning rubber and death hung in the air.

   I lowered the glasses and handed them back to Cantrell, drew a sleeve across my forehead to wipe the sweat away, pulled my hair back off my shoulders, wrapped it with a leather cord strung with Crow beads and turned away from the road, my back against the cruiser’s door.

   I had no business being there that day.

   “I’m not a hostage negotiator, man,” I said. “I’m a writer. This is a mistake.”

   Cantrell dropped the glasses through the cruiser’s open window onto the front seat. “Tell me something I don’t know, Mr. Hart. This whole goddamned day’s been a mistake.”

   “If you know it’s a mistake, why am I here?”

   A trooper in riot gear sidled up to the cruiser and handed Cantrell a Kevlar vest. Then he ripped open a Velcro flap on his own, pulled out a revolver, dropped the muzzle down, handed that to Cantrell as well and ducked off to a command trailer behind us. Cantrell handed the vest to me, racked the pistol once and checked the safety.

   “Because I got two people down at the end of this road, Mr. Hart. A Statey that never made it out of her cruiser, and a warrant officer wounded inside that house. Maybe dead. I don’t know. Because I got booby-traps surrounding a military-class nutcase who’s growin industrial strength weed and thinks he’s still in Khe Sanh or some goddamned place. Wants the world to know his fuckin story, and you’re the guy—the only guy--he wants to tell it for him. Look…”  He dropped the magazine out of the pistol’s grip, eyeballed the rounds and slammed it back home. “Right now, Mr. Hart, I don’t give a fly if you’re a goddamned milkman. You’re the best shot I’ve got to keep this from turning into a war zone.”

   Away west, thunder rolled in the distance, groaning in deep reverberant cannonades above

the roiling darkness. The air was too still. I’d seen weather like this before, and scanned the horizon, watching for the funnel to drop. You got to where you could feel one up there, up above the cover, rotating ever faster, its sheer centrifugal force creating bolts of lightning deep inside the thunderheads that sparked like so many flashbulbs going off behind a billowy screen. I’d seen that before, too, rolling across Nha Trang like a tsunami. The bao – the typhoon.

   “Storm coming,” Cantrell said alongside me.

   I turned and looked back down the road and knew that for the grunt inside that house, it already was a war zone.

   “You have no idea, man,” I said. “No idea.”

....

Ten minutes later, white flags fixed to the front bumper corners, Cantrell pulled his Jeep to a stop two hundred yards downroad. I climbed out and eased the passenger door to the Cherokee closed, took my mission pouch and field recorder from Cantrell and slung the strap over my shoulder. In the sweltering heat my shirt was already mottled with spreading, dark patterns of perspiration. Not that I could lay all the sweating I was doing on the humidity. That I wasn’t likely to survive the next half hour probably had something to do with it.

   I slid the walkie-talkie Cantrell’d given me into a side pocket of the pouch, still incredulous that I’d let myself be talked into this. If there was ever a textbook example of a suicide mission, this little errand was, or should be, it. He opened the glovebox, pulled the pistol out, checked the safety, and angled the grip towards me. I shook my head. Again. He nodded once and put the pistol on the bench seat next to him. “Don’t say I didn’t try,” he said. And then, “One hour. They come out single file, hands in the air.” He held up the walkie-talkie. “I don’t hear from you, we’re going to Plan B.”

   I stepped away from the passenger door and watched as Cantrell shifted the Jeep into gear, spun a short circle across the crumbling blacktop and slowly drove the two-hundred yards back to the roadblock, the tail end of the Cherokee receding into the grey of the morning, a phalanx of gun sights and roof racks glinting beyond it in the dull light.

   I stood for a moment keenly aware of the silence, As still as the air was above me, the vacuum around me now fell into a dense, almost palpable quiet, save only for the zzzt and buzz of the mosquitoes, which were everywhere, spawning spontaneously, it seemed, from the grey ditchwater lying stagnant on each side of the road; the brackish surfaces literally alive with hovering clouds of the things, dimpling the water as they alit for mere seconds before rising back up into the swarm. I knew it’d be maybe seconds before they targeted me, but any movement from me was out of the question. The instructions had been clear: I get out of the Jeep at the culvert and wait.

   That same cold wire was coiling around the inside of my chest, now. Cantrell’d been gone all of two minutes and I was already regretting that I’d even picked up the phone that morning.

   I pulled the walkie-talkie from the side pocket of the field recorder’s pouch, laid my thumb on the TALK switch, and turned and looked back up the road towards the command center. I looked for the snipers I knew were hidden somewhere around the county salt shed, and across the road in the big doublewide they’d commandeered early that morning. I looked for the front end of the Jeep to roll out from behind the roadblock. I looked for salvation. I looked for cover. I looked for my ride off of this miserable road.

   When I turned back towards the house, partially hidden behind the tree-line, the boy was waiting.

....

He looked to be fifteen, maybe younger, wearing hunter’s camo head to boot and carrying what looked to be an ought-six with a tactical stock and scope. He had it cradled in the crook of his left arm, and had a right cheek that held a tennisball-sized wad of gum or a plug of tobacco. That question was settled when he angled his head downward and propelled a long stream of brown tar out of his mouth.

   He raised his head up, uncradled the rifle, and hooked his free hand towards me twice, beckoning me in his direction.

   I took all of five steps then stopped when he held out his hand, palm towards me. “See this ground between us and the house?” he said. “You gotta stay right in front of me. You gotta walk zackly where I tell you to. You don’t, and you’re dead. If we don’t kill you first, that is…”

   He spit a second stream of tobacco and angled the barrel my way.

   “Walk straight to me and do zackly what I tell you, when I tell you.” He shifted the rifle to his other hand and looked quickly back towards the house, then back to me. “Now…”, he said. “Walk.”

   I crossed the width of the road and stepped into the heart of the windbreak and stood maybe eight feet from him when he held his left palm up again.

   “Stop,” he said.

   I did.

   “Turn around and spread your feet and arms.”

   Ditto.

   Behind me, he closed the distance and did an obviously practiced pat-down. Took my field recorder pouch off my shoulder, opened it, seemed to expect what he found and slung it back over my shoulder. Put the barrel of the rifle a few inches from my chest.

   “Turn around. Look for where the brush is beat down and line that up with the porch. Now walk…and don’t stop until you’re at the front door.”

   Through the windbreak, the path where ‘the brush was beat down’ was easy enough to follow. Across the yard (if it could’ve been called that), not so much. A quarter-lot of county-grade pea gravel splashed with a dozen or more sparse hanks of field grass and ragweed, improbably taking root in the stone. I kept the porch in the middle of my line of sight, and walked as straight a line as I could to the steps then up to the front door.

   The boy said, “Stop”, but the word had barely left his mouth when the door opened and the boy said, “Go”, and prodded me across the threshold with the barrel of the ought-six, slamming the door behind us, sealing me inside.

   The abrupt change in lighting rendered me all but night-blind, and unable to see who’d opened the door, but after a moment, my eyes began to slowly adjust to the room.

   A long, rectangular living room, sixteen by twenty, maybe. A sofa, a few pieces of second-hand furniture, a tv console and a portable set, two pre-fab bookcases filled with paperbacks (four of which I recognized from the spines—they were mine), walls draped with unit flags and county maps, and fifteen, maybe twenty feed sacks filled with dirt stacked in front of the windows.

   In the corner closest to me, beside the two picture windows, an aging man sat immobile in a wheelchair, a green tank attached to the frame behind him, clear oxygen lines hooked over his ears and inserted into his nose. A tracheostomy collar circled his neck, with a small round vent covering the opening in his throat. A short-barreled over-and-under shotgun lay across the armrests, held fast by both his hands, and a pair of fieldglasses hung about his neck. Slivers of grey daylight cut through corners of the feed sacks blocking the windows, throwing thin patterns of light across the front of his bib overalls and his chair.

   At the small round table slightly behind and to one side of him, an older, haggard woman with thinning hair the color of pewter sat in one of two straightbacked chairs, her head wrapped in a cloud of blue smoke from a cigarette she was crushing out in an ashtray. On the table, a tin coffee pot with a glass percolator top sat next to two cups, and what I guessed to be a .45, her right hand resting on the grip, finger looped down through the trigger guard.   Neither the man nor the woman moved. Nor did their eyes move off of me, rooting me, it felt, to where I stood.

   From where she sat in the corner, the woman toed a chair back from the table, and the boy nudged me that direction with the barrel of the rifle.

   “Sit,” he said.

   I crossed the room and sat between the woman and the man, my back to the window, slipping off my field recorder pouch and hanging it off the back of my chair.

   The boy sidled up to my left, the rifle at rest in his right. “This is my Meemaw, Emorine, and my Papaw, JL.”

   A nod from each. All but imperceptible.

   But then the woman turned her head, and I followed her eyeline to the far side of the room, partitioned by a finished-out quarter-wall with an arch that marked the dining area behind it. A ceiling lamp hung from above, throwing a weak yellow light on the table below it and the body lying atop it. Arm in a makeshift sling, wearing a blue state windbreaker with a gold shield silkscreened on the front, a hole through its middle, the blood having turned the blue and gold to a deep purple.

   The warrant officer Cantrell didn’t know was alive or dead.

   I was maybe fifteen feet away, but I nevertheless instinctively looked for some kind of vital sign… the rise and fall of his chest…something.

   “He’s alive,” the boy said.

   But from where I stood, I wasn’t sure. Sling notwithstanding.

   “If he is, he needs a doctor,” I said.

   But the boy didn’t answer. The answer came from the man coming through the dim of the hallway leading to the back of the house. His voice low-slung, measured and matter of fact.

   “He’s been doctored.”

   Coming into the weak light, he looked like he’d just materialized out of the DMZ. Tall, rangy, wearing jungle fatigues and a black beret with the Tiger Force patch over his left eye, crowning a head of hair that spilled down to his shoulders. An M-16 hung low in his right hand.

   “Shoulder wound”, he said. “He’ll live. Trust me, if I’d wanted him dead, he wouldn’t be lying ‘cross my mama’s table. He’s had a couple of shots of morphine to knock him out, and Meemaw’s taped him up.”

   He shifted the M-16 to his left hand, crossed the room, stopped and saluted me, stuck out his right and said, “Pettimore, Sir.”

   I stood, took his hand, returned the grip and said, “Jason--”

   “--Hart,” Pettimore finished, my hand still in his grip. “Been waitin a long time to meet you, sir. S’pect I’ve read near everything you’ve ever written.”

   My hand still in his grip, I glanced at my watch and marked the time since Cantrell dropped me off, then cut my eyes back to Pettimore.

   “Listen, man,” I said. “You got to give yourselves up. All of you. You’ve got an officer dead in your driveway and one near dead on your dining table. There’s three counties of Mounties and a platoon’s worth of federal boys wrapped around this land like a noose. And all of ‘em with their fingers on the trigger.”

   Thunder rolled across the valley floor and a light rain began to fall, the drops pinging off the tin roof and the stovepipes. “If you don’t walk out of here inside an hour, you’re probably not going to walk out of here. The government’s not just going to…”

   “—the gub’ment?!”

   The woman.

   “The gub’ment’s tried to keep us from walkin out of here for as long as I’ve been here.”

   Both Pettimore and the boy had moved to the sofa as I sat back down, their backs to the agent on the table, their firearms across their laps.

    “Fifty years or more,” she went on. “Fifty years of tryin to cut a livin’ out of this ground. Barely makin enough to get by, babies goin to bed hungry. Ever’ time we’d get a little bit ahead, somebody from the gub’ment’d come out and tell us why we had to take two steps back.” She nodded towards the old man. “His daddy turned to shinin just to make us enough to eat.”

   Falling silent, she tapped a Pall Mall from the pack in her apron pocket, reached in again and pulled out a kitchen match, drawing its head across the roughed out wood on the underside of the table and striking it afire, lighting the tip of the smoke with a blue flame.

   Outside, the storm was building, the wind buffeting the house and the rain lashing in quick torrents, now.

   Across from me, Pettimore moved the M-16 from his lap, leaned it barrel-up against the sofa seat, and scooched himself forward to where he was kindly perched on the edge of the cushion.

   “I hardly ever saw Granddaddy growin’ up,” he said. “Daddy was off workin’ the mill in McMinnville and Granddaddy just didn’t come around all that much. Had him a lean-to up near the still, and he’d bunk up there for weeks at a time. Take that Oldsmobile to town maybe twice a year, buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line, and wouldn’t nobody see him for another month, idn’t that right, Daddy?”

   Seated next to me, the old man raised a palsied, crooked finger from around the barrel of the shotgun laid across the arms of the wheelchair, and placed it over the hole in his throat, then lowered it, and simply nodded once.

   “Ever’body knew he was makin’ shine,” Pettimore continued. “And when the feds found out, they sent a revenue man up to find the still. He never come back. Neither did Granddaddy. Federal boys never found the still or the revenue man.”

   As if triggered by the memory, the old man shot his hand to his throat as a wet, hacking cough wracked him, but he waved off Pettimore when he stood to help.  

   “Daddy and me and Uncle John picked up the slack, and business was good for awhile—weekend runs to Knoxville were payin’ the bills and Mama had food on the table. I might should’ve stayed, but when I turned eighteen, all I could think of was how fast I could leave this holler and this road. Got to where I could smell the whiskey burnin’ like it was part of the air. I volunteered for the Army on my birthday, and prayed to God I’d never have to come back here. Did two tours in the ‘Nam before I hung it up. They wanted me to reup for a third an I told em to kiss my ass. Didn’t care if I ever saw another .16 again. Give me the Purple Heart. Told em I still wasn’t stayin. Pissed the old man off. Said I was turnin my back on the men that needed me. Said I was walkin away from my duty. Maybe I was. I don’t know. I was done, man.”

   He stood, reached across the table and tapped out a Pall Mall from the woman’s pack, thought otherwise, then slid it back in and sat back down.

   “I’d lost count how many gooks I’d greased. How many our own I’d hauled out of the jungle.  Pieces of men I knew.  You know what I mean. You’ve been there. Started havin the dreams before they give me my discharge papers. Shrink at the base in Japan said it was…” (like he’d memorized the clinical name) “…early onset of post-traumatic stress disorder. I thought I was losin it. They give me a bottle full of psych meds and cut me loose.

   “Flew me into San Diego and I took the bus from Ord out in Monterey. Wanted to see the country I’d been killin people for, y’know. Rode with a bunch of Messicans out of Vegas and some pencil pusher from Reno said he’d been campaignin for the prez. Big hero now. Papers ‘n the tv all sayin he ended the war. Got us outa ‘Nam. Bullshit. Aint no president ever ended any war. Sure as hell not this’n. Gooks ended this’n, hoss. Kicked our ass right outa Saigon I kid you not.”

   Pettimore took a beat, and I glanced across the room at the warrant officer. In the dim, it looked like he’d moved, but I couldn’t be certain. That cold wire was snaking up my spine again as Pettimore went on.

   “Got off the bus in McMinnville two years to the day I left. I wasn’t fixin on stayin’, you know. I’s just going to get a grip on a few things and map some shit out, you know. But with Daddy and Mama turnin sick like they did, and the boy growin like he was, I needed to step in and step up. So I come up with a new plan.”

   He reached in his vest pocket and pulled out a small oblong tin. Opened it, and lifted out a long spliff, the paper a wheatcolored tint, the ends dovetailed. He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger like a cigar, then pulled a silver Zippo lighter out from the same vest pocket, flipped open the top with a flick of this thumb and fired it up, setting the tip of the flame to the end of the joint, pulling and holding the smoke deep into his lungs before blowing a thin blue stream of pungent smoke in my direction then handed me the spliff. I let the smoke drift lazily upwards to my nose, breathed in the redolent scent, and saw through the veil of vapor that all eyes were locked on me, waiting. Smoke curling around my head, I slowly brought the joint up and pulled long and hard, drawing a hit I could already begin to feel. Not to say that I was ignorant of that particular sensation. I exhaled, and Pettimore picked the story up.

   “I took seeds I’d kept from Colombia and the river bottom below Khe Sanh. Bought hog manure from Cletus Franks over in Dibbrell, and started composting down the draw below the corn stand. Six months later, junior and me were cuttin buds and baggin. Two months later, we’d made enough to pay the bank notes on the farm.”

   I handed the joint back to Pettimore, but he gestured towards the woman, who took it from me, and shotgunned a roll of smoke into her nose that would’ve put me on the floor. I must’ve looked like I’d unhinged my jaw.

   “She’s got the cancer,” Pettimore said quietly. “Come up in her back last year. Says it eases the pain some.”

   She took another draw, handed the spliff back to Pettimore, then exhaled the smoke across the top of the table like dry ice.

      “Last year, we put five more plots together in the corn stands ‘tween here and the Sligo junction. We were sowin hybrid seeds, now. Fuckin nuclear weed. Workin it every day like a soybean crop… like respectable farmers. And we were just the tip of the spear. They’s seven or eight of us between here and Cookeville.”

   He pulled on the joint and handed it back to me. I waved it off.

   “What happened?” I asked.

    Exhaling, his words came out with the smoke, like they were wrapped in it. “The DEA happened. They’d been tipped. Don’t know who, prob’ly never will. Put a chopper in the air with infrared imaging and pods full of Paraquat. They’d ID the stands and spray the Paraquat across the corn and weed both, like a crop duster. Killed damned near every plot and plant. They’d cut across the gap at night, spotlightin the fields and…”

   He stopped mid-sentence, his eyes glazing.

   “He’d be gone to bed,” the woman picked up quietly, almost in a whisper. “Hear those helicopters flyin over us and wake up screamin—like he was back in the war.”

   She fell silent, magnifying the sound of the storm outside, the rain heavy now, the winds tornadic. She crushed out her Pall Mall and lit another right behind it, turning a knowing look in my direction.

   “Like I said, two steps back.” She said through the smoke.

   “We were gonna lose everything,” Pettimore said. “I had to protect the unit. Defend my men. The boy and I set out the perimeter, laid the charges and set the tripwires.”

   He took a last pull from the joint, licked his thumb and forefinger and pinched the burning ember out.

   “I learned a thing or two from Charlie, you know”, he said. “Told that Statey out yonder she needed to stay in her vehicle. She didn’t. That ain’t on us. And that federal boy on the table is lucky all he took was a round in the shoulder and not a claymore.”

   He slid the spliff into the small tin and pocketed it.

   “I didn’t want this. None of us did.”

   I looked at my watch and back to Pettimore. “What do you want from me?” I asked.

   “We’re common people, Mr. Hart. Common people that’ve been pushed down by our own government for decades. I joined up to fight for my country on my own because they draft the white trash first… around here anyway. I’m one of thousands, mind, thousands of ‘Nam vets that’re fuckin lost in our own goddamn country.” He waved his hand in a lazy circle. “Just like this family.”

   The woman, the old man and the boy all turned their eyes to me.

   “It was your books and articles turned my head around, you know. First time I ever read anything that sounded like I think. I want you to tell the story, Mr. Hart. I want my boy, here to know who we are, why we’re here. I want him to know the truth about this life, this war we’re still fightin…this family…this road.”

   “And if I agree?”

   “Then we throw down and walk out of here. All of us.”

   I returned Pettimore’s gaze, the looked to the woman, the old man and the boy.

   “Deal,” I said.

   He put his hand out, but before I could take it, a column of lightning bright enough to see through the sacks piled in front of the windows erupted from the skies, filling the air with a brilliant white light followed by a boomer that sounded like an Abrams firing off a round, plunging the already dimly-lit house into near-pitch darkness. Dim enough that no one saw the agent on the table hike his pantleg up and unclip a 9mm from an ankle holster—until he was drawing down. He had his finger to his lips and was slowly sliding off the table when the woman saw him and cried out.

   “Gun!”

   Instinctively, she gripped the .45 and raised it as she stood, Pettimore and the boy now turning, weapons in hand. When she fired, the shot went wide, but the agent’s didn’t. The first round struck the woman in the center of her chest and put her back in the chair, like she’d decided to sit back down. The second clipped Pettimore on the shoulder, but not before he’d brought the stock of the M-16 to his hip. He was clicking the safety off when the agent’s third round put him down. On my left, the old man was raising the twelve-gauge as the boy was lunging for his father. I leapt across the space, my arms in the air, between him and the boy and the agent. But I was too slow. I caught the buckshot between my shoulder blades, punching the wind out of me and knocking me into the boy. The force blew us both to the floor, my body covering the boy’s, my consciousness slipping away, the chaos, the storm, the voices and the pain slowly receding, like I was on a dimmer switch. In one brief, final thought, I reminded myself to thank Cantrell for the Kevlar, and then I was gone.

....

Cantrell filled in the blanks after I’d come to in the command trailer. The storm blew past as fast as it blew in. The warrant officer was being treated and debriefed. Pettimore and his mother were both dead. The old man had suffered some kind of seizure and was on his way to Vanderbilt in Nashville when his heart stopped. They had the boy in the containment trailer in lockup.

   I picked up my field recorder pouch, stood and slipped the strap over my shoulder, the pain from the buckshot radiating through me like an electrode.

   “I want to talk to him.” I said.

   Cantrell cut his eyes sideways and cocked his head.

   “Why?”

   “I made a deal,” I said. “I intend to hold to it.”

....

The containment trailer was shorter than the command trailer, the rear section divided from the front by an 8x8 cage, empty save for a cot, a chair, and the boy, shackled to an iron ring bolted to the floor. Cantrell unlocked the cage, and at my request, brought a small side table in, then left the trailer, leaving the boy and me alone. I slid the chair away from the bars and faced the boy, and set my field recorder on the desk, unwound the microphone cord and turned to the boy.

   “You sure you’re ready to start this…this soon after?” I asked him. He nodded once and leaned forward slightly and placed his hands on his knees.

   “I am, sir.”

   He paused, falling silent, a shadow passing over him. “I’m all that’s left, now.”

   I pressed the red REC button on the Wollensak and brought the microphone up to the boy. He took a deep breath, leaned forward and spoke; his voice like an echo of his father’s.

   “My name’s John Lee Pettimore,” he said. “Same as my daddy – and his daddy before.”

© 2025. JBuck Ford // With grateful thanks to Steve Earle